The Makers of Avengers Infinity War Agree with the Villain

They disagree with Thanos' methods, but not the underlying reasons.

It would be hard to come up with a villain strong enough to justify a story involving 20+ superheroes, but Thanos is that villain. Avengers: Infinity War could have been a disaster. It wasn’t, which is a testimony to the creative superpowers of those involved, superpowers to rival the Hulk’s strength.

Why am I talking about a movie that has come and gone? Because the cracks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s moral confusion and mediocrity begin to really show up in this movie. And since nearly everyone has seen it, it’s a good example to use in showing how a film can get you to swallow faulty assumptions.

Because movies do this all the time. They dip their lies in rich chocolate, so we don’t think twice when we grab a handful and devour them without much thought. But now, more than ever, we need to be keeping our brains turned on when consuming entertainment.

The Motif of Thanos

Thanos conquers planets so he can kill a random half of the population, then leave and go to the next one. He sees himself as a bold being of action, taking on a heavy burden to bring balance to the universe. His plan for the infinity stones is this same motif writ large, as gathering all of the stones will allow him to kill half of all life in the universe with a simple snap of his fingers.

With religious fervor, Thanos sees himself correcting the problem of overpopulation and the poverty brought on by a scarcity of resources. This coin-flip genocide revolts all of the heroes on-screen, and the whole film is made up of various teams trying to stop the atrocity.

But not a single hero questions the underlying premise that drives Thanos.

A Mere Tactical Disagreement

The film itself validates Thanos’ premises and even wants us to agree with the strategy while shrinking away from his particular tactics.

At one point, Thanos talks to Gamora, whose planet was a victim of his “mercy.” While Gamora complains, Thanos fires back that before he killed off half the population of her planet, there was rampant poverty and hunger and that Gamora herself was a victim. Thanos challenges her to look at the planet now. They are thriving. Everyone has everything they need.

And the film never calls shenanigans. As far as the film is concerned, the plan worked. Thanos’ goal (utopia reached by solving overpopulation) is meant to be seen as noble, and it is one of the ways the film attempts to make him sympathetic.

If Thanos were trying to help someone with tooth pain, he would advocate pulling out 50% of the teeth, chosen randomly. The heroes would be aghast at this barbaric idea. With righteous indignation, they would declare that a more surgical, precise, and humane approach is required to fix the problem.

Meanwhile, the poor patient doesn’t actually have tooth pain at all. It’s a complete misdiagnosis. The patient actually suffers from a mild stomach ache and a hangnail on their ring finger. But the film really wants you to focus on that tooth pain.

The tooth pain that doesn’t exist.

The Real Problem with Thanos’ Plan

So the real problem with Thanos’ plan is not the plan itself but how the film really wants us to view underlying, faulty assumptions. And many people have swallowed these assumptions like a hungry fish gobbling up a hooked worm.

There are two main issues with this implicit validation of Thanos’ presuppositions.

1. It assumes a fixed size of the pie. If one person gets a piece, that means there is less for everyone else. But that’s not how the world works. That’s not how economies work. The pie gets larger. More population can ostensibly mean more wealth generation potential. It’s faulty to assume that more people equals fewer resources for everybody.

2. People are not hot-swappable nor equally interchangeable. Believe it or not, we are not all equal in the varying contexts in which we must navigate life. What if Thanos had actually killed all the farmers on one planet, or maybe an inordinate amount of the engineers that designed and repaired the technology necessary to produce food in sufficient quantities? Thanos is much more likely to breed chaos than to usher in a utopia.

We have historical parallels of what happens when a society murders large chunks of its population, and it ain’t pretty. There is no peaceful “rising from the ashes.” It results in more bloodshed, more starvation, and more misery.

It all reminds me of Jared Diamond (author of the popular Guns, Germs, and Steel) and his 1987 paper where he argued that the advent of agriculture was mankind’s worse mistake.

Why?

Because it allowed the population to grow, which led to all sorts of evil. Diamond eventually goes on to romanticize infanticide and says other things that make him a philosophical ally of Thanos. If not in deed, then certainly in spirit. And Diamond is not alone. People actually take Diamond seriously, the same way that Avengers: Infinity War wants us to take Thanos’ diagnosis seriously.

Watch Your Step

When watching a movie, always be asking what the filmmakers want you to believe as true and what they want you to believe as good. Because they have an agenda. They have a worldview. Even G-rated movies can have poison in them, a poison that is more dangerous because our guard is down. Just look at how disobedience, carelessness, and envy are rewarded in The Little Mermaid. The true villain in that movie isn’t Ursula the sea witch. The true villain, according to the arc of the movie, is Ariel’s father.

Poison in the movie doesn’t mean you should avoid that movie (although many times it does mean that.) Life itself is full of dangers you must navigate. But keep both eyes open. Train your discernment. Watch your step.